


Redundancy

by moderne



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-25
Updated: 2016-05-25
Packaged: 2018-06-10 17:07:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 460
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6965770
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moderne/pseuds/moderne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Root used to follow gods, and now she follows ghosts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Redundancy

Root used to follow gods, and now she follows ghosts. The change in scale diminishes her. She grows aware, against her will, of her own body. How breakable it is. How cold it grows, some nights, her circulation flagging in her fingers and toes. She could easily be undone. Imagine: she topples off the ledge. The gas chokes off her higher brain functions. A bullet hits between the ribs. It is exhausting, almost farcical, tallying all the ways she could render herself useless.

Once she would have happily become a martyr. Thrown herself upon the pyre, the rack, the sword. Humanity wasn’t built to last. She had a higher calling. She prayed in wounds and gunshot residue.

But now there’s the issue of insecure data. For all the surveillance state’s omniscience, there remains some information never entered in a computer system. Moments that security cameras never recorded, or recorded from the wrong angle. Shaw joked about the Mets, of all things. Shaw took a moment between gunfights to check Root’s injured knee, clinical and thorough. Shaw glanced back at her, something like worry in the wrinkle between her eyes. 

It’s all relevant, and it all could be lost in an instant. Ghosts fade. Skulls crack. Every system needs redundancy. So in between the numbers and the unending search—the failed attempts that leave Root weighted with that feeling of a fall that can’t be stopped—she backs up her memories.

It takes time. A few hours at a library, Harry’s holy land. The books and their long-dead authors loom over her. Longer at a series of coffee shops and bakeries, the sorts of places essential to the collective hallucination of New York. At nearby tables twentysomethings in beanies work on their novels, and old friends meet to network without admitting they’re networking. Root ignores them and focuses on the screen in front of her.

Privacy isn’t the goal. On the public wi-fi she builds programs to spread her messages, creates websites and accounts to be lost in a sea of shouts into the void. She finds abandoned pages and hacks into backend code that no human will ever read. The words spill out, quick as bleeding. They’re inexact. Imperfect. The human mind is so easily corruptible, eroded by time and wishful thinking. But they’ll last, one way or another. If the Machine survives—and She must, despite it all—so will this data.

One evening a number calls Root away from the task. At a street corner she pauses, eyes locked on a security camera. “You need to find her,” she says. “No matter what happens to me. You understand?”

A man jostles her, curses under his breath. His cell phone screen flashes a text from an unknown number: YES.


End file.
